From: Ed Trager (ed.trager@gmail.com)
Date: Thu Nov 01 2007 - 07:17:32 CST
Hi, Ben and list colleagues,
In the particular case of the glyph for Ben's name, is it not already
within the realm of possibility to construct and OpenType font that,
upon seeing the sequence "⿵門龍" would substitute a single "ligtaure"
glyph via the GSUB table or some other similar mechanism?
I'm sure that someone among the many typography experts on this list
can confirm or deny this.
If for some reason the current OpenType standard and rendering engines
are, for whatever reason, not quite up to the task, which seems
unlikely, then surely SIL's Graphite technology could be used to
create such a font, right?
A number of Open Source CJKV font creation projects are already in
existence. Of these, the most famous is probably the 文泉驿 Wen Quan Yi
project:
http://wqy.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/index.cgi
The project started with the goal of designing a human-tuned bitmap
font because Hanzi with many strokes are just too often difficult to
read on computer screens when rendered from outline fonts, and CJKV
hinting is just impossible. Now the project also has an online
Ajax-based vector-based glyph design application:
http://wqy.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/index.cgi?VectorAjax
Has this well-organized and popular project already begun to tackle
the issues of historical and variant Hanzi whose composition might be
uniquely specifiable via the Ideographic Description characters (IDS)
? I have no idea.
But clearly they might have an interest in doing so now or in the near
future. If there is a community of volunteers (hint, hint) interested
in contributing to such an effort, then it can happen.
And, as a reward, volunteers may get the chance to encode their own
special IDS-based "ligature" ideographs directly into this
widely-used, widely-distributed Open Source font. Sounds like a good
deal to me! :-)
Best - Ed Trager
On 11/1/07, Ben Monroe <bendono@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The script is clearly Han, not a constructed script.
> In any case, I desire to use it whenever writing in Japanese, not just
> for a select limited audience. In the past, most people would not be
> bothered to install it.
> In which case, just using <U+2FF5 U+9580 U+9F8D> is the simplest. Even
> if someones environment does not render it as desired (likely), U+9580
> U+9F8D should still display.
>
> > (Which code point did you use?)
>
> I'm away from the computer with that font, so I'll have to check a little later.
>
> Ben Monroe
>
>
>
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